Archives for August 2008

I’m a huge fan of Person Accounts (Salesforce’s phenomenal combination of Account and Contact that allows selling B2C–the best example I use is Land’s End, which sells to people). Orgs can use a hybrid model, allowing a company to track its, e.g. partner companies (B2B) and individual customers (B2C).
There is an interesting limitation to Person Accounts: They cannot be converted to B2B via the Salesforce front-end. The record type can only be changed via the API, using a tool like Data Loader or the Excel Connector.
I set out to create a tool that would use the API to convert the record type of a B2B to B2C and back.

What was I thinking? Using something as complicated as a hijacked (from the Console) Task view was bound to have problems when creating an Activities tab.

Let’s restate our goals:

Create a tab that will show Activities, using the Enhanced Lists view.
Don’t have two rows of tabs.
Question: Is there any way to make a view and to specify that we don’t want to see the Sidebar AND the Tabs?

A few weeks ago, I went on a Low Car Diet. No, I didn’t come up with the name; it’s the invention of Zipcar, a growing company with a product that, in these times of rising gas prices, is not only filling a growing demand, but is creating a market for its service.
After speaking to some people at Zipcar, and having rented cars a few times, I have come to realize the following:
In this age of Web 2.0 (and, according to some, Web 3.0), when Software as a Service is growing faster than ever, the on-demand model can be applied to other sectors, creating, for instance, Car as a Service.OWN NOTHING
Ask anyone who drank the Software-as-a-Service Kool-Aid about in-house servers and you’ll be greeted with a face that looks like someone just took a bite out of a lemon, peel and all. In today’s quickly-evolving Information Technology world, ownership is nothing; rental is everything. How much does it cost to own a file server (including hardware, electricity, air conditioning, salaries for the in-house geeks, space that can’t be used for an office refrigerator, and more) per year? Compare that to the cost of storing files on Amazon Web Services! Compare purchasing a VPN appliance to the monthly cost of certificate-based Single Sign-On products like MyOneLogin by TriCipher. Pooling capital costs and being charged only for what we use is the new model. I don’t want to have to buy a 1TB NAS drive, and then to worry about if it is filling up; I’d rather pay per GB for shared storage, where my information is just as private, and arguably more accessible while being more secure (since nobody can walk into my office and steal my drives).
Cloud Computing is where it’s at. This is the solution to problems caused by using in-house systems and desktop applications inaccessible from any computer outside the office. And Cloud Driving seems to be just as viable a solution to the headache of owning a car and paying for gas, insurance, parking, and maintenance.
Let’s compare Salesforce, the top on-demand software application created by salesforce.com to Zipcar, a leading on-demand driving service created by, well, Zipcar.

Google Docs has templates, and those of us using Google Apps with our Salesforce org (which should be almost everyone, since it’s free and easy to use) can design company-wide templates. This, combined with Google Docs’ super collaborative features, should make things much easier for consultants.

To display a tab of Activities, just like you can with Accounts, Opportunities, etc., use the following URLs in the Web Tab configuration screen: /home/actlist.jsp?isdtp=mn Displays a full-page list of Activities (Tasks and Events) The list is non-enhanced, even when viewed in an “enhanced lists” org. /home/actlist.jsp Displays Activities with the Sidebar and Tabs these are especially useful if you have Enhanced Lists enabled – it looks amazing. Create additional views for Tasks or Events, and then save the URL for each as its own Web Tab as desired. (For example, in my org, My Open Tasks is https://na1.salesforce.com/007?fcf=00B30000005UoEi – I made a Web Tab and in the URL put “/007?fcf=00B30000005UoEi.” Worked perfectly. Enjoy! Addendum: To prevent multiple rows of tabs at the top of the page, you can launch the tab from a link. The best way to do this is to put a custom link in your sidebar […]